La den Gourmet, the restaurant that cooks with what is there (and in winter it makes the broth with wood)

THEin Gourmet Tana It is not a restaurant that can be reached by chance: here, on the Asiago plateauyou arrive to spend the winter holidays on the snow, or, in fact, to try the cuisine of Alessandro Dal Deganone who has made symbiosis with the territory in which the fulcrum of its cuisine lives. Other than zero kilometer. The chef, in his lair, cooks with what is there, and if nature – especially in the strictest winters – gives nothing but wood, then it invents The wooden brothand makes one of his dishes Signature.

And it is at that moment, when we get to the story of the wooden broth, that the chef really manages to attract our attention. We arrived in Asiago like many others, to taste his cuisine, and in particular a menu of You are taken to the coffee (designed together in Nespresso, with six different monorigine coffees of the Origins range), proposed in pairing with six treated drinks – as it uses at the den – as “Liquid dishes”. Little caffeine – the equivalent of a cup and a half in everything, explains the chef before the start of the dinner – very little alcohol, no salt in the dishes (this also affects, in fact, above all because the result often knows how to be naturally savory, thanks to concentrations and spices) and the construction of a combination in which what is in the glass is really complete what is on the plate, and vice versa. So Pairing is thought here, in a menu that is staged as a theater show. There are no different schedules of booking, at La Tana Gourmet: you get to the time indicated (only by booking the day before, “so we prepare what we need and there are no waste”), we sit, and when you open the curtain you are served, All together simultaneouslywith dishes that dance towards the tables that sometimes become “social” instinctively. Everyone, at the same time, are tasting Alessandro’s cuisine Dal Degan, and sometimes they want to comment on it aloud.

Dishes like an extraordinary polenta with mushrooms and roast coffee, for example, call some appreciation, while a little amazement comes with the liquid pairing that accompanies it, an incredibly savory and full (there is no salt, it is worth remembering it) infusion of fermented mushrooms with ginger and coffee.

The chef lets it, pleased by this interaction, which gives life to A room that wants to be young, informal, yet in some way authoritarianwith a single tasting menu to choose “in the dark” and without giving too many limitations to the chef, because the risk – he explains – and not to be able to fully enjoy the experience of the kitchen. If you are willing to come to La Tana, you rely on the chef, to the territory, to its very personal cooking philosophy. Otherwise, perhaps, this is not the right place to you.

Sustainability according to the den

In La Tana Gourmet, sustainability has precise rules, which they dictate with rigor what they do, even when they are not commonly understood. “It is a term we have abused, and today he risks not meant anything anymore”explains the chef from Degan. «For us it has many aspects. First of all, the raw material: we were among the very first to work with the wild product, when no one had yet heard of foraging ». Then it became a fashion, and the den wanted to detach a little from that. “I discovered this thing naturally,” he says. “The father of my partner is a great connoisseur of the plateau and his nature, and walking with him I understood that what I had always considered a lawn could become an open -air market”.

From there the chef started, going to ask the elderly of the place, home for the house, how those herbs used them, and trying to get knowledge from it. A cultural recovery workhe calls him, that even if some things already knew them has brought him a baggage of lived life stories. «A story that touched me a lot was that of a lady from a district of Asiago called Foza who told us that as a child, in the second post -war period, there had been a particularly rigid and snowy winter, and they had remained fully isolated, to finish the stocks. Then his mother had taken a pot, filled her with snow, and had boiled her with pieces of wood to give it taste. ” From there it arrives The wooden broth, made with red fir, wild juniper and small part of the core and pine mugo.

Then sustainability is made of raw materials: most come from a seventy network Local micro -producers“Even very small, like Marco, who only makes tomatoes and onions in the summer”, and then by the two vegetable gardens, one for the plants and the other for the aromatic herbs. “But sustainability, for us, is also supporting the territory, to give value to crazy companies that do not have the strength to put themselves on the market,” says the chef. As one of the last molecari, who are going to disappear for climate change and for the effort of a job that makes too little. In fact, the cuisine of La Tana is not necessarily at zero kilometer. There is the fish, so much, reminiscent of the historical and cultural link of these places with Venice. And there is also Japan, and coffee, because in the end “Food is one of the greatest satisfactions we have, and you have to enjoy it”although intelligently. “If I am licked at the zero kilometer here in winter I sell the snow,” the chef jokes. “I prefer The good kilometerand sustainability as an empty word I prefer the application of common sense ».

Seasonality, of course, which means stocking up and setting aside, as the tradition of these places wants, and how they do in La den, among the first places in Italy to experience seriously with fermentation. “And then there is also the sustainability given by a peaceful environment where people grow upfrom an internal social value in which Enrico and I – Sommelier and companion of experimentation, editor’s note – We believe a lot ».

The menu is rigorously seasonal, and it could not be otherwise, and also the experience dedicated to coffee will vary in its summer version. About thirty preparations that are served in a dozen exits, between liquid and solid dishes. And a very precise road to follow, for those who want to do it.